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Week 9: Still ongoing fallback from Spectre and Meltdown

There is still fallout from the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities announced late last year. Microsft toward the end of January announced they were providing a patch which removed Intel's initial attempt to fix this gap. It seems there is some additional issue which occurred due to Intel's fix. The big issues are the Intel causing machines to reboot. Intel had suggested this only applied to machines with certain chips. "Initially this was confirmed to be the case for Haswell and Broadwell chips; Intel later confirmed that it also applied to Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Skylake and Kaby Lake parts (Bright, 2018)."
Recently, Intel has published a new fix for this on the Skylake chips. The new code is being distributed to companies so that they can include it in updates. "This latest update is only for mobile Skylake and mainstream desktop Skylake chips. It neither fixes the Broadwell or Haswell problems, nor does it apply to Kaby Lake, Skylake X, Skylake SP, or Coffee Lake processors (Bright, 2018)."  Intel indicates beta testing of other fixes for the remaining processors is ongoing.
It is likely this vulnerability and this fall out will continue to last till it completely remediated. At this point, it'll be likely late Q2 or early Q3 before we can assume this fix is in place for most of Intel's chip. Given one out of six Intel chips have been remediated and it has been just over six weeks, we can safely assume it'll be awhile. Most of the hardware companies have set protocols to prevent this issue from being exploited till it can be remediated.


References:

Bright, P. (2018, January 29). New Windows patch disables Intel's bad Spectre microcode fix. Retrieved February 12, 2018, from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/new-windows-patch-disables-intels-bad-spectre-microcode-fix/


Bright, P. (2018, February 07). Intel releases new Spectre microcode update for Skylake; other chips remain in beta. Retrieved February 12, 2018, from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/intel-releases-new-spectre-microcode-update-for-skylake-other-chips-remain-in-beta/

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